Are nihilists "spoil-sports"?

So, I’m reading this book by Johan Huizinga called Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. The basic premise of the book, or from what I’ve gathered it to be without actually reading the whole thing, is that human beings, and for that matter all beings, operate their entire lives under the conditions of play. That is, playing is an activity committed by certain beings for no other purpose than itself, exists almost entirely within spatially and temporally fixed spheres (e.g., Vatican City, funeral processions, baseball diamonds, etc.), and has a certain distinction or sovereignty from “the rest of reality” (video games are perfect examples).

Now, Huizinga basically says that all actions, words, and thoughts (and, resultantly, all institutions, social structures, and governmental systems) made by animals that operate within the mode of social hierarchy (e.g., wolves, primates, dolphins, humans, etc.) are simply meaningless acts of play. Where it becomes complicated is the seriousness to which the players of these games are in fact taking it. Whimsical playing, like that of romping puppies or imaginative children, are almost never taken seriously, whether by onlooking outsiders or actual participants of the game. Huizinga says that what makes these games so appealing to us is the enthralling quality of them; the degree to which they preoccupy our minds. As these games become more complicated and, thus, more enthralling, the more we forget how unreal the game actually is. The middle road of this spectrum could be said to be paradigms of contests, competence, and chance (e.g., athletic sports, chess, gambling, etc.). Soon, these games grow so large in whom they encompass, and so complicated in how they work (e.g., economies, governments, societies), that everybody begins to get lost in their play-characters (Huizinga cites instances where tribespeople, who adorn themselves with masks for ritualistic play, will often become so captivated by their roles in the ritual, that they “forget” reality).

Of course, this could be linked with the premises of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (an interesting notion, come to think of it), but that’s for another post. What’s important here is a part in the book where Huizinga mentions what he calls the “spoil-sports” and “cheaters”. He asserts that games accrue players and teams and objectify certain tasks and in so doing formulate very durable social and communal bonds (e.g., church liturgies). Thus, the types of players that are often ostracized or punished by these play-communities are “spoil-sports”–those who fail to recognize the sovereignty of the rules of a certain play-area–versus the “cheaters”–those who feign compliance to the rules while breaking them, fully operating within the conditions of the game. In truth, the only difference between the two is that the latter breaks the rules in secrecy while the former breaks them in public. He goes on to suggest that the play-community will often tolerate the actions of the “cheater” over those of the “spoil-sport” so as to preserve the sanctity of the play-area and its rules. In this way, I interpret the “spoil-sport” as being quite the nihilist, an iconoclastic polemicist that tears down the values and rules of every contextual system he can put his hands on.

Could it be argued that reality is a forgotten realm of wonderment? That only the value-debasing ways of a nihilist, who takes nothing seriously, not even his own existence, can sober a world fraught with delusion and play-pretend gone wrong?

I can broadly agree with Huizinga’s thesis as you’ve presented it. However, I think that both you and Huizinga make the mistake of assuming there is some world beyond that one. There is talk of people being ‘lost’ in their character, but what is there beyond the character? Why separate the person from the character? Your talk of nihilism, likewise, is strange because it demands going beyond the ‘fake’ system to a real system, yet that would seem to deny the very idea of nihilism! “A world gone mad” demands both that the world was once sane and that sanity can exist.

No, I totally agree; that’s why I tentatively referenced Baudrillard; in Simulacra and Simulation, he pretty much says the same thing as Huizinga, except he goes further to deny that reality is even salvageable. The little proverb he likes to use is the one where the king has his royal cartographers draw the most detailed map that they can. The map becomes so detailed, the entire kingdom can’t tell the difference between the map and “real” terrain.

I think nihilism is, thus, just as vain as the philosophies it disdains; that is, it hopes to salvage “reality” in spite of its relative non-existence.

More on this later. I have to go, you know, “celebrate” Christmas with the family. O:)

Bataille > Baudrillard

Nihilists are simply realists.

Realists maybe to a point but, most seem to lack pragmaticism.

It still seems to me that nihilists are positing a ‘real’ reality, or at least that their system of belief demands one if there is to be any meaning. I’m not saying that circularity is bad in philosophy, but whenever it is employed it can really only be done so with no expectation of others accepting it prima facie. Yet nihilists present their ideology as a universal one.

I’ve sort of asked this question about Baudrillard before. I have an inkling that the Deleuzian virtual/actual distinction provides a means of coming to terms with this in a broader sense, but I haven’t read enough Deleuze yet to see how. I’m not sure that I see, either, how all human activity can be reduced to “game-playing” - are there no necessary activities?

Part of it probably has to do with the human/non-human distinction. Animals feed whereas humans dine. There is certainly an aspect of play in dining. Then all we need to do is leave that post-Christian attitude behind and realize that other pack-animals also have rituals and roles associated with their ‘feeding’ making the distinction between their activities and human activities non-existent.

So it would need to be formulated as:

All social engagement involves an aspect of play
Humans are social creatures

Ergo, what humans do, in their capacity as human, will always involve an aspect of play.

Edit: I liked the notion of hyperreal as you discussed in that link. Still seems to be a little dualist, but I can see how the terminology is meant to cut through that dualism.

I agree with the notion of play being a fundamental social feature of human existence, and as someone who takes the primacy of sociality so seriously I suppose that should lead me to agree with the Huizingian thesis, but I think we should try to press at these abstract ideas like “play” or “hyperreality”, etc., as they are used in philosophical contexts at least. Nevertheless, the basic idea of play as a metaphor for social existence does seem quite a rewarding one.

Bataille; is he a postmodernist as well?

I’m not sure if either of those are good labels for nihilists–moreover, why are we even labeling the self-proclaimed “unlabel-able”?

I think nihilists are “spoil-sports” as Huizinga says; they refuse to abide by or even recognize the rules of the game(s) and are therefore distractions to others in the overall realism of the game. Huizinga himself delineates that one of the primary characteristics of play is its overall detachment from reality via its imitations of reality. He, however, has as of yet touched upon what reality is (and I doubt he will).

My conception of it goes like this: we’ve become so enthralled by our most intense and serious games, that they’ve become our realities. Reality and realism are just as much operants within a game’s given hierarchy as are its other rules. Games and play are like finite, self-contained bubbles of “sense”–what I mean by “sense” is that things “make sense” within these bubbles–in an overarching world of infinite absurdity–where nothing “makes sense”.

Thus, nihilism is striving for destination that will never come; a reality that doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t “make sense”.

You could even make the argument that, as so long as all of existence is in itself purposeless and a mere whimsical vagary, the Universe is nothing more than an expression of play. It makes sense, really, to say that the temper and capriciousness of existence amounts to nothing more than a baseless jest. Albert Camus said it himself when he called it the absurd.

Here’s another take on it; my friend Eric is reading this book with me:

But Camus opposed nihilism most violently and embraced existentialism. Seems a rather poor counter-point.

Who said I was even asserting nihilism? I’m promoting nihilism’s effects as a counter-balance for the weighty delusions of the masses {like Nietzsche did), but in no way am I making a case for nihilism in its totality. Reread my previous post if you must.

Again, the contradiction raises its ugly head. If ‘the masses’ are ‘deluded’, they must be in some way, incorrect. If they are ‘incorrect’, then there must be a ‘correct’ thing that the nihilists are pointing towards. If there is nothing, as the nihilist posits, then ‘the masses’ are correct because they have created their game that they play by and, ironically, the nihilists are incorrect since they continue to operate in the society in question while pretending not to recognize the game being played.

First off, I don’t think its so simple as a correct/incorrect dichotomy. I think you make the mistake in assuming that nihilists and ‘the masses’ are tugging in two different directions; how I see it is that they both end up in the same muck of nothingness if either side were given enough slack. Which is why either extreme is bad. What needs to be attained is a golden mean in the center where we take our games seriously enough to reap whatever benefits they bring us but not so much that we end up in vegetative or comatose states of perpetual gameplay.

One could argue that people accused of being nihilists by a play-community are simply detractors of that particular game going on. We’ve seen countless times people being accused of atheism, anarchism, or communism for simply dissenting from popular, and more importantly, serious games. Those who profess themselves to be nihilists are, in my opinion, fakes. All humans play games, it’s how we process the world. For a living, breathing person to sit there and say they live in a world without gameplay, as I’m sure you can conclude, is completely nonsense.

In truth, I don’t support self-proclaimed nihilists. However, considering my overall distaste for the current sociological trajectory, I do support nihilism itself.

I can agree with the virtue of the mean and I can also agree that a take-what-comes attitude is often best. Each situation needs to be viewed for what it is and no more, straw dogs as it were. I can also agree with your statement on nihilists ultimately being ‘fakes’ since taking-each-game-for-what-it-is pretty much demands a broader metanarrative (game) for it to take place in. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any advantage in it in any way what-so-ever.

So, yeah, no dissent here. Glad we cleared that up :slight_smile:

Nihilists are not spoil-sports but more///tattle tales.

tattle tales?

do you mean like they ruin our fun by speaking the truth?

“what truth” says the nihilist…

Yeah, I knew you and I were in agreement.

However, I think more needs to be emphasized on where society is going. I think that we are currently in a state where games have been leveled off in such a way that either (a) little to no effort must be applied to “win” in certain play-contexts, or (b) too much effort is required to “win” in certain play-contexts. Once again, I think a golden mean is needed here.

I think we need look back at archaic man, at primitive societies to see how we once were and the reasons for which games were originally created. I mean, of course, we all know that the teleology for games can be deduced from an evolutionary standpoint, that the adaptive value of approaching the obstacles of survival in terms of gameplay was significant enough to foster minds such as ours, but we still need to reevaluate why we play (and, thus, live). In a way, the question “Why do we play?” is so much more answerable than the question “Why do we live?”, despite the fact that they nearly mean the same thing.

In order to answer the former question, we must (a) quit asking the latter question and (b) begin taking the games we currently partake in a little less seriously (or a lot less seriously, depending on how much of a hurry you’re in). The reason for (b) is because, if the games we currently partake in aren’t fulfilling for us, what is the use in playing them; that is, if “winning” means either too much or too little effort must be applied, why not abandon obsolete games for new ones? To that effect, the jester is the nihilist, for to make fun of something of value is itself the most debasing, depreciating, and demeaning form of iconoclasm one can commit. Thus, if it means we must make new games to dismantle the ones already in place, as nihilism so vehemently calls for, than I say let them have their fun.

I tend to see the problem with the modern games is the starting position of people within them. While hierarchy is a vital component of the games being discussed, much of that hierarchy is generated by a genetic lottery. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll engage in games of chance from time-to-time, but the skill-to-luck ratio (especially that initial part) is too high. I’m not saying let’s try and create a game like chess, such an idealistic system would re-create the very same problems that we are experiencing right now. I just think we should have little adjustments here-and-there.

Have you ever read “After Virtue” by MacIntyre? I think you’d like it. Particularly the part about King Kamehameha II. He was a Polynesian king who removed many of the old taboos and rituals in his society with little-to-no resistence. The reasons why the rituals persisted had become so alien to their condition that all it took to remove them was a member of the institution maintaining them to stop. While it wasn’t dealt with in the book, I’d offer the case of Turkey as a contrast. Ataturk outlawed many of the old taboos and rituals in his society but he met with a great deal of resistence. He managed to, heh, ‘take care’ of most of that during his lifetime but the tension between the secular Turkish army that has eschewed those old trappings and the religious, voting population that very much embraces those old trappings is incredibly evident in Turkish politics. Heck, it has gotten to the point where elements of both the Kemalists and Muslim ideologies can be held by the same person, so the tension that exists in the macrocosm of the society also exists in the microcosm of the person.

A lot of what separates those situations deals with the manner of games being played. In the case of Kamehameha, a whole new set of ideologies were being imposed from without. Granted, many of them were destructive (wearing clothing designed for the sensibilities of Victorian England on the Hawaiian islands doesn’t really make a great deal of sense) but the changes were adopted because of how they were imposed. In Turkey, it was a Turk who was imposing these changes (again, many of them silly. Wearing a suit while tending the field doesn’t make much sense). Plus one attacked traditions that had essentially died, whereas the other attacked traditions that were still quite vital.

I’m not sure what that all means, but it is worth considering.

hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sign-play.html